Stardock announces that Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion is smashing all the company's previous sales records. They offer some details on this, including some praise for the impact of sales on Steam, clearly putting the rivalry over once having owned the competing Impulse service in the rearview:

The company has sold more than 100,000 copies digitally to date of Rebellion

The company’s internal projections factored in a large “cannibalization” percentage of its own direct sales through its web site and sales from its former digital distribution platform Impulse (now owned and operated by GameStop.)

Sale stats showed that Steam sales did NOT cannibalize those sales

Steam sales instead replaced what Stardock has usually seen via sell-in at retail

Darks wrote on Jul 25, 2012, 17:44:You might want to check your pc or get a better internet connection. I play this game regularly for at least 5 hours at a time. And we never get any lag. I’m not sure what your system is running, but the new engine they came out with for this game has the game running pretty damn smooth.

Game lag not internet lag, I only play single player. And late or large game slowdown happens to pretty much everyone I'm surprised you you haven't seen it (OC'd Q9400 with 560Ti here). Just google "rebellion slowdown" and you have people say the same thing on high end I7's. There were even community optimization mods for the previous game it got so bad. They didn't come out with a new engine for this game they just added some graphical features and tweaked the old one, hence why it's stuck to single core still. The new engine will supposedly appear in Sins2.